The Ada Initiative advisory board is a group of volunteers from across open technology and culture who have the passion, knowledge, and time to actively support women in open technology and culture. The advisors play a crucial part in the Ada Initiative’s work: sharing their knowledge of communities like open hardware or Wikipedia, helping organize AdaCamp and other events, reviewing and writing policies and articles, taking a key role in fundraising, sharing their expertise in areas like law and non-profit governance, and, of course, giving advice.

In order to keep in touch with open tech/culture communities and avoid burning out our volunteers, we actively recruit new advisors and encourage existing advisors to step down when the time is right for them. We’re very pleased to introduce the latest additions to our advisory board:

Mel Chua; hacker, writer, and educator with over a decade of teaching and curriculum development experience and a solid track record in leadership positions at Red Hat, One Laptop Per Child, Sugar Labs, Fedora, and other Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. Currently based at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education, she bridges academic research on successful communities with deep personal experience getting her hands dirty building them.

Sky Croeser is currently a lecturer at Curtin University. Her research and activism focuses on the ways in which activists are working to shape, as well as use, the technologies of everyday life. Her PhD, ‘The global justice movement and struggles to control knowledge’, was undertaken at the University of Western Australia in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, and her subsequent research has looked at digital liberties activism in Bangalore, India, and at the ways in which Occupy Oakland activists are using Twitter to organise and communicate.

Alicia Gibb is an advocate for open hardware, an academic researcher, and a hardware hacker. Alicia has worked within the open source hardware community for the past 3 years. Currently she is founding the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), an organization to educate and promote building and using open source hardware. She also teaches at UC San Diego. Previous to serving OSHWA, Alicia was a researcher and prototyper at Bug Labs where she ran the academic research program and the Test Kitchen, an open R&D Lab.

Andrea Horbinski is a Ph.D. student in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently serves on the Board of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the protection, support, and preservation of fan works and culture that runs the Archive of Our Own, one of only two majority-female open source software projects on the Web. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow to Japan, studying hypernationalist manga in Kyoto, and was a founding member of the OTW’s Internationalization & Outreach committee, which she now co-chairs.

Joseph Reagle is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern, a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (The MIT Press, 2010).

Sara Smollett is a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, where she has also worked on many diversity efforts. She has previously worked for the Wikimedia Foundation, is an occasional Wikipedia editor, and has led a Wikipedia editathon at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

We’re thankful for the help and important contributions of our outgoing advisors, Alice Boxhall, Francesca Coppa, Deb Nicholson and Matt Zimmerman and wish them success in all of their projects. We thank them for their continued support of both the Ada Initiative and women in open tech/culture and look forward to working with them in the future.

Thank to all our Ada Initiative advisors, past and present, for your incredible support of women in open technology and culture! And thank you to the open tech/culture community at large for your hard work and commitment to gender equality. Without all of you, the changes of the last 2 years would never have happened.